Ubuntu MATE is pioneering pre-installed snap support by being the first distro to ship a snap by default. For the Ubuntu MATE 17.10 release the pulsemixer snap, a console based mixer for PulseAudio, will be installed by default.

The daily images of Ubuntu MATE 17.10 are now seeded with the pulsemixer snap. We encourage you to download the currently daily image, install it and ensure pulsemixer works correctly.

Pre-installing snaps by default in the desktop images was an outcome of the Ubuntu Rally that took place in New York a couple of weeks ago. Installing the pulsemixer snap by default in Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is being used as a pilot and what we learn will help the Ubuntu Desktop team with their efforts to ship snaps by default in Ubuntu 18.04.

Adding pulsemixer to the default Ubuntu MATE 17.10 has not significantly affected the size of the iso image. We chose pulsemixer because it is a small, useful application, that has never been available in the Debian or Ubuntu archives.

We had been looking at doing something like this in Ubuntu Budgie. It is awesome to see that you have gotten it working and have a method to get this type of thing done. We (UB) are extremely interested in this as we have certain apps that make sense to be sent out as a snap!

If you read the comments on that merge proposal you’ll see that it will eventually be possible to define snaps that should be shipped by default via seeds. For now a hard coded list is exported directly in livecd-rootfs as SNAP_LIST.

@popey ell the primary (test) was going to start with our welcome screen. And then considering some 3rd party defaults for things like mail clients, browsers, etc. And anything we develop in the future would likely be a snap. The only real blocker was more so “how” to do this properly (pre-install snaps) without getting real hacky.

Here is what we’ve learnt from adding the pulsemixer snap to the Ubuntu MATE 17.10 images:

During the call for testing several testers attempted to run pulsemixer from the live image. Snaps do not run in the live image currently, this was a cause for confusion and could be blocker for some snaps in the future.

The current mechanism for adding snaps to the image doesn’t support classic snaps. We also wanted to include micro and teleconsole but were unable.

The snaps are embedded in the image only. Anyone upgrading for an previous major release, or an earlier 17.10 alpha/beta, didn’t get pulsemixer added to the system.

Goodday gentleman… I’ve been rereading this thread, and was just sort of looking to inquire what the current status is. If there’s any sort of documentation on how to start looking at this type of thing. We are really keen to snap our welcome application for 18.04. I’m also trying to get this nailed down so that I can sort of figure out what the process will be to deal with things like upgrades from previous versions of Ubuntu (as per @Wimpress previous comments). Is there a more accurate thread to follow the development of this?